MOI PASSES: COLONIAL VS PEOPLES' HISTORY
And pick your version.
They say, there is a silver lining in every cloud; if one looks hard enough. I will take a hard look at DT Moi's long twenty-five years of rule. Neither will I fail to detect some silver linings.
On the light side, there was a lively gush of sycophantic music, and, I swear, never has boot-licking and propaganda so pushed the boundaries of creativity in whatever art form. My best listening was
Orchestra Mangelepa's Mtukufu Moi –--We love you forever Baba Moi, and we trust you for eternity! There was of course a mock quality to the song, since the Zaireans were, once again, facing deportation for working illegally in Kenya. This usually happened whenever they demanded royalties accrued from one more hit added to their chain of hits. Most members of this ever-smash-hit band would die destitute: robbed to the bone by a scorch-earth system more feudal than capitalist.
On the folkloric side, the country teemed with many sing aways, the so-called NYAYO SONGS, including the legendary
TAWALA KENYAand the memorable
Patriotic songs so-called too!
On the behavioural level too, I think the Kenyan political culture attained her peaks in the arts of sycophancy. None shall ever be born who shall better the likes of
Kariuki Chotara, Okiki Amayo, etc etc. And they just weren't mere sycophants, they were like suicide warrior guards. They seemed to have an inner mission, a conviction. I think centuries from now –---when this period is long distant, and can be commented upon without passion, the Moi era will produce the best comedies. Think for instance of
Robert Ouko's post-moterm report: Suicide at Got-Alila.
On the hardest side, the silver linings are the lessons learnt. In the same period of time as the Lordship Moi and his KANU was Alpha and Omega of looting in a stagnating Kenya, the
Asian tigers went turbo charge on the industrialisation track. If the Asian states were equally totalitarian, their investment in education and modern productive methods was
monomanic, eventually unleashing unparallelled labour productivity and ingenuity. Meanwhile the fortunes of Kenya (and, unfortunately the host of African states) comparatively went graveyard. The Moi regime will offer the classic test-tube study case of what went wrong so long: the don't do's if we want to build a worthwhile Kenya.
NB: A worthwhile Kenya need not be capable to build a 3000-bed hospital in as many days as God created the Earth and all in it –--as the miracle-working Chinese have done post CORONA attack; but a worthwhile Kenya would make
short work of the plague of locusts in a few days; build dams which didn't collapse on a drop of rain extra; have a 100% transition rate, but not to schools which are Kakamega or Dagoretti death-traps!
Just the simple stuff you know, like running water at a public toilet at a city bus/mat park!
Comparatively then, DT Arap Moi's were lost decades, primitive and off civilisation. That would be a dangerous nyayo to fwata, decades on!
NB:
The murders of chaps like Ouko and Archbishop Muge are historically insignificant. Jomo Kenyatta's murders of
Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto and JM Kariuku were much more profound in their historical reverberation. The talent erased in the Kenyatta murders was stuff a nation does not easily recover from.
Anyway, all living things die some day. Even Kenya as we know it today will die, or is it wither away!
Eh, Moi lived quite long, past a century by one account by his long-serving PA, a Mr. Njiru.
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